Well it’s been a while since I last posted, but there is good reason, aside from all the freelance work I’ve been doing which I’ll go into in another post soon, I’ve also been busy working on Chatsum. So it is with great pleasure that I can now announce that Chatsum has launched, is live, and open to new users!

In case you don’t already know, Chatsum is a FREE add-on for your web browser that lets you chat with all the other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you. But that’s not all, Chatsum also acts as a way of looking more closely at your browsing history, allowing you to see what you’ve looked at the most in the last week and in total since you first joined Chatsum. You can even share this information and make use of it in your own site via the integrated RSS features. For an example take a look at my member page.

We’ve got heaps more features planned both in the immediate future and long-term, including support for Safari in addition to the existing Firefox extension, so why not take a look and sign up for a free account and start Chatsumming today.

Well today George and I went to The Future Of Web Apps Summit in the Kensington Town Hall conference centre. I actually had a really fun day, and some of the talks were really quite interesting, a couple of points might even prove useful.

The speakers included such luminaries of the Web 2.0 world as Joshua Schachter the founder of Delicious, Tom Coates of BBC, Yahoo and Plastic Bag fame, and Shaun Inman. I think the awards for the best talks go to Tom Coates, Joshua Schachter and Ryan Carson. Each of these guys covered some different territory, from Tom’s more esoteric conceptual musings on the direction of the ‘atomic’ web, through helpful technical details from Delicious, to an interesting case study of the economics of starting a web services based business on a budget from Ryan Carson.

Coates also included a slide of the Chatsum homepage in his presentation, and while I’m not totally sure he meant it as a complete compliment, it was still good to get a shout-out and we got some good feedback from people as a result.

The two presentations I enjoyed the least (barring the advert from Adobe) were Shaun Inman and David Heinemeier Hansson. Shauns’s talk was a little on the short side. He was supposed to be talking about APIs, but to be honest the other guys had already covered it, and in more depth. I think it’s a shame he didn’t focus on how visual interface design can contribute to a web 2.0 app as I think that’s his real strength. Hansson’s presentation was a pep-rally for Ruby On Rails, and although I could see a certain elegance in what he was evangelising, it did strike me as the sort of technology only someone with OCD could really love, and he came off a bit prescriptive for my tastes.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day, and our first outing as Team Chatsum! Oh, and check out the photo of Ryan looking a bit like action man. How does he get his skin to be so perfect and shiny?!

In case you’ve been clicking around the site you may of noticed that the portfolio section has seen a few updates today. It’s still not quite finished which you’ll know if you’ve read much of the text, but hopefully I’ll get it sorted over the next few days.

Also I’m having a fun day out tomorrow with the rest of Team Chatsum (a.k.a. George) at Carson Workshops’ “The Future Of Web Apps Summit” in Kensington.

If you’re going along then do seek me out and say hi. In addition to hearing some interesting talks I’ll be whoring myself around in the hopes of being offered millions of pounds to work on earth shatteringly exciting projects. Alternatively I may just wind up talking to the plants and crying into my soulless frappuccino. You decide!

Happy New Year! For my first post of the year I’d like to tell you all about a little project I’ve been working on. It’s called Chatsum, and it’s the brainchild of my old friend George Grinsted. For years now George has wanted to create a way to let people who are visiting the same website communicate with each other, and contribute to the content itself.

Recently users have been given new ways to interact with websites through commenting, trackbacks and wikis. However all of these forms of interaction require that the website itself chooses to implement them. So although the opportunity for the reader to become the author has increased, it’s still pretty limited and is only really ‘the norm’ on blogs like this, or on more technically orientated sites. There are of course many notable exceptions such as Wikipedia, but I think you get the point. Well we’re hoping that Chatsum will change that, let me tell you a little more about it…

Chatsum is a free service that allows you to chat with other users who are looking at the same website as you. There are two interfaces currently in development, the first takes the form of a sidebar extension for Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is the worlds most popular open source web browser and is widely regarded as the best browser available for Windows and Linux users. The Chatsum sidebar lives in the side of your browser (big surprise) and houses a fully-fledged chatroom. The clever bit is that the chatroom is specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes too, automagically! Open a page in a new tab? No problem, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re currently viewing, no matter how many tabs you’ve got open. There is the option to switch between a page level room and a site level room, and you can also see what rooms/pages are popular with other Chatsum users.

And I did mention that we also have a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4 in development…

We’re currently inviting people to join our beta test and hope to release the Firefox sidebar within the next couple of weeks, with the Widget soon after. We have lots of exciting features planned and intend to take a pretty aggressive approach to adding them. I’m particularly excited by all the extra community stuff we’ll be doing on the site and by some new possibilities that are emerging in relation to bringing Chatsum to an even wider audience. If you want to keep up-to-date with the development then check out the development blog, and also please do sign-up to the beta test, we really need your help, and the sooner we can get going with the beta test the sooner we can start implementing all the new stuff!

Chatsum Site
http://www.chatsum.com

Chatsum Development Blog
http://www.chatsum.com/blog